When you drive more traffic to your site, you increase sales.
The snag is, there are over 200 factors to consider when winning favor with Google.
Any reputable search engine optimization professional will tell you that one of the biggest and most important part of search engine optimization is backlinks.
Indeed, backlinks have more influence over rankings than any other single factor.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks occur when one website links to another site.
Google favors pages with links from other sites leading to them. You can think of these much like votes or signals of trust.
The more links you can get, then, the higher your page will rank in Google searches.
Before you get carried away, it’s not that simple!
Get a more in-depth tutorial to link building here.
Quality Backlinks
Unfortunately for you, Google doesn’t just look for any links from any random site. Links must be good quality.
A quality link is a link from a trusted site. For example, if The New York Times provides a link to your site, that’s a higher quality link than one from a freelance interior design blogger.
Relevance is also a crucial factor. A link from The New York Times to an interior design blog is not as effective as a link from Apartment Therapy. The latter will obviously be far more specific.
How Does Google Use Your Backlinks?
Google watches the performance of your web property over time and ranks your site accordingly.
The number of backlinks that you’re getting right now influences your ranking. The number of links you get over the long haul is also considered.
To reiterate: links must be relevant.
Links also need to command domain authority, too, but what is that and why should you care?
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority (DA) refers to how authoritative the website is that links to your site. DA is ranked on a sliding scale from 1 to 100.
The sites with the highest domain authority are giants like Facebook, YouTube, and the mighty G.
It’s much tougher to get ranked from 10 to 20 than it is to get ranked from 1 to 10. In fact, it gets exponentially harder to achieve higher domain authority as your site increases its visibility.
How Do You Know A Site’s Domain Authority?
You can find out how authoritative a site is by visiting Ahrefs. Simply type in the site’s domain name and it’ll return the domain authority ranking. This is a paid tool.
Moz has developed a free version called Open Site Explorer if you’re just starting out and can’t yet afford to go all-in with paid software.
How To Increase Your Domain Authority?
Improving domain authority means:
- Getting lots of backlinks
- Obtaining links from specifically relevant sites
- Snaring links from sites with high domain authority
If you can nail these three main factors, your site’s rankings will go up.
Resist the temptation to outsource this job to anyone but a professional SEO.
How about scoping out the competition, then?
Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlinks
There are a number of steps to take if you want to check out your opposition.
Firstly, examine your competitor’s websites and see who backlinks to them. You can do this by using a backlink analysis tool such as Ahrefs or Alexa’s site comparison tool.
Type your competitor’s URL into the search bar and look for the most visited pages. A competitor backlink analysis tool will provide you with information such as who links to your competitor, which links are used, and which backlinks your competitor aims at.
Write A Good Quality Post
Read through the blog posts from the links that are most similar to your site, and then write an article that blows them out of the water. Try writing authoritative posts that are lengthier – no fluff, though! – and highly relevant.
It’s not just about shoehorning in those keywords either. SEO has evolved since those days of keyword-stuffing. In 2020, you need people to visit your blog, to keep reading, and to return. Without worthwhile content, that’s not going to happen.
Drill down into every aspect of your topic. For example, if you wrote an article on making coffee, don’t just write about how to boil the kettle or use a coffee machine. Write about the types of coffee available, the types of coffee makers you can use, the water temperature, and brew time.
Roundup Posts
One of the swiftest routes to getting great backlinks is to write some roundup posts.
There are different types of roundup posts, but a neat trick is to contact a number of experts in a given field and ask each one a specific question. Each expert will give their own individual response to the same question. Most are likely to comply with your request as it’s an opportunity for them to get free online exposure.
Once you’ve got everyone’s responses, write a killer blog post highlighting them. Ensure you include their name, company name, and a link to their site and social media profiles.
Once you’ve published your blog post, get back in contact with each expert, and ask them to share it on their social media.
This approach is ideal for generating more traffic. The more views your site gets, the more backlinks you’re likely to get linking to your site, and the better your ranking.
What To Do Next
But, don’t take my word for it, check out the our link building case study to prove our method works.
If all this still seems like something you would sooner pay someone else to do so you can focus on your business, we get that. We do the same with all parts of our own business outside our core competencies.
So, reach out today and schedule a consultation. Here at Jackson Digital, we’re still exploding rankings for businesses the world over even as the pandemic continues to make things difficult.
If you’d sooner get right down to business, we get that, too. Call us today on 562-250-4200 and let’s discuss how much money you’re leaving on the table and how we can help you scoop it up!
